Life After Leaving Ukraine and Mariupol

Getting Out and how to live when your family is in Mariupol

By Tania Rak

Working with words on the daily basis, I often think they can be redundant in daily life. It seems like the war unifies the human and national experience, bringing your personal experience to a common denominator. But guess, I should bring some light on this period, my personal experience of life after leaving Ukraine and Mariupol.

You go through survivor guilt syndrome, ask yourself whether you are doing enough, see that people abroad just... live. While your thoughts are fully and completely at home. Meaning in your motherland. During 46 days of the war, you learn that home can be just a concept in your head since your physical one was bombed, burned and became a graveyard with crosses in front of your windows.

Coming from the Southern East of Ukraine, your daily schedule will most evidently look like mine: you check ALL local chats, groups, public pages, and news. There you are searching for info on your address, addresses of relatives, friends, friends of friends, acquaintances - everyone who you care about. You try to get out everyone you can. And each life becomes a small victory. You are scammed - with promises, money, lost time. Most evidently, you also find out about new death cases daily.

Yesterday I had a dialogue with a close friend:

- Hi, I need to share.

- Hey, sure.

- It seems like my grandma was burnt alive. Tania, do you know, if the body was burnt, is anything left from it?

How can you respond? How can you calm down another friend whose whole family was killed by a shell and then burnt together with a house? What to respond to his words, "Tania, I even won't be able to bury them"? What to do if these talks become daily, with different people?

Meanwhile, one night you open the well-known local channel and see the images of your own house. Pardon, its leftovers. These are walls, but home is also about safety. At least, in my paradigm of the world. Should I say it's gone? Memories, photo albums, a little porcelain tiger, a collection of comics. Stupid, right? But guess we find ourselves more attached to non-material things.

It's cruel to take the property, crueller to take your memories, but what is even eviler - is that it goes to the masses. Most of the people will be able to return to their cities or homes. In Mariupol, everyone became a hobo. Mariupol exists in minds. Miami-size ghost town. 440k people before the war.

How many innocent lives were taken? What for? The exact number is unknown. And it won't be. Some bodies will be defined, and some will be exhumed. But how many lives are buried in mass graves and under the rubble? They say mobile crematoriums already hit the city. How many war crimes would be hidden in them forever?

Bucha, Irpen, Gostomel, Chernihiv, Kharkiv, Kramatorsk. I can relate to these cities. As a Ukrainian citizen and personally - my roots are from some of the cities on the list. How can you stay indifferent when you see images with a note of "sensitive content containing violence" 24/7? Turns out, within some time you... adapt.

The images of corpses frighten you less. You think "okay, that one was already published on Twitter." Till you see something specific of course. Yesterday I saw the worst image since the beginning of this war. The photo of a man with a shot head at Kramatorsk railway station. To clarify: he had HALF of a head with protruding entrails.

I thought I started to get immune. After all, you do most of the things automatically - you wake up, check the news, connect people with people, people with volunteers, you search, search and search... I think that an undervalued, worth mentioning aspect of war is a total emotional block.

When you are tired of trying and crying. And I am more than sure that emotional blocks are common these days. You do what you need to do because you have to pull yourself together. Doesn't matter that inside you'd like to hide from the whole world. War also has phases... Emotionally as well. When a burnout becomes a new norm. Most evidently, you won't live the way you used to.

But how to live after still remains a question. Let's say one of the factors like losing home/ not knowing where people who you love are, is enough to lose your mind. What if it's all in all? With a responsibility to build your life, solve dozens of questions at the same time and now knowing what future holds? What if masses live through a similar experience? New lost generation?

I thought I could hold on. Because whining is the most disarming state of being, making you forever chase "whys" instead of working on the consequences. But indeed, I sympathize with all stories, each broken and taken lives. Today my mom called me after a month of silence. Alive, still not safe. We talked for 2,5 mins till we got disconnected. One of the most heartbreaking things is to hear how she cries, knowing that you couldn't protect her from the dreads of war.

Within the time, news pieces of a puzzle pop up - she was sitting in a cellar for a certain period - no food, no water, cold, scary, fully cut off from the outer world. When the house was burnt, they decided to burn that cellar as well. Cause why not! It's so funny to see how hommies have a shortage of oxygen, running under the crossfire, saving their lives.

The district where my grandpa lives was attacked with phosphorus bombs. I still don't know what's with him. The current state of Mariupol is that thousands people are on missed lists, thousands are killed or injured. Almost everyone is homeless.

You can think you are a tough cookie able to adapt, but indeed, it is impossible to adapt to losses, dreads and miseries.

Tania Rak lived and grew up in Mariupol she writes for LIBERTATIO here